Can customer service, marketing, and other people-centric business aspects be effective if they’re devoid of empathy? Can you genuinely serve and please people if you don't understand their pain points?
Some believe it's impossible to satisfy and retain customers without properly understanding their needs. The best way to understand what your customers need is by empathizing with them.
Sadly, many brands and businesses fail at the subtle art of empathy. Interestingly, these brands believe they actively employ empathy in their customer service approach. This belief system is termed “empathy delusion” in marketing. A 2019 study by Reach showed most marketers don’t understand and empathize with consumers. However, these same marketers believe they practice empathy.
Here, we’ll explore the concept of empathy and how it can help you win over your customers.
What Is Empathy?
Empathy generally describes the ability to identify and understand other people's emotional states. It represents a perceptive ability to read other people's actions, inactions, and mannerisms to tell how they're feeling and respect it. Empathy enables you to sense people's responses and imagine what they think or feel.
The above is the base definition of empathy; however, it doesn't end there. It's not enough to sense and understand what people are going through. You must be willing and ready to help improve the customer's situation regardless of your position. Doing that brings out the true essence of empathy.
Empathy in marketing involves genuinely understanding your customer's unique needs and providing help however you can. It involves putting the customer needs above or on equal terms with your desire for profit. An excellent way to do this is to make it a customer service objective to give the best to your customers at all times.
People tend to confuse empathy for sympathy. Of course, the bottom line for both concepts involves identifying and recognizing another person's plight. However, there's a subtle difference between them.
Sympathy involves understanding a person's situation from a distance. You don't need to imagine yourself in the person's position to show sympathy. Sympathy is a natural human response to seeing others in situations where we wouldn’t like to find ourselves.
Conversely, empathy is a show of emotion that comes from imagining yourself in another’s current position. You're not trying to understand from a distance. Instead, you're putting yourself in the prospect’s position. By trying to walk a mile in their shoes, you can grasp what they're going through and put yourself in a better position to help. So in a way, we can describe sympathy as a feeling and empathy as an action.
Having a good understanding of what empathy entails makes it easier to practice. That said, how do you practice empathy in business and keep your customers happy?
How to Win Customers in Business With Empathy
81% of customers need to trust a brand before doing business with them. The best way to gain that trust and win customers is to let your marketing efforts show you understand your customer’s needs - through empathy.
Below, we’ll explain exactly what we mean.
Establish a Direct Channel of Communication
At this point, having a direct channel of communication to link customers with care agents is a fundamental customer service practice. Therefore, we can assume you already have such a system in place. However, we can't rule out the possibility that some businesses don't provide such avenues for customers.
Customers do detailed checks and research before shopping with a brand. The absence of a direct communication line with the brand can reduce their chances of purchasing your products. Empathy involves showing you care about your customers enough to provide assistance when they need you.
You can win customers when you provide an easy avenue to lodge complaints. For instance, providing your contact info on a potential exit page will make it easier for customers to reach you. It’ll motivate potential customers to trust your brand.
This principle doesn't only apply to communications with customers. You can also employ it for communication at work. Enable a mode of communication that allows care agents to relay customer concerns to you effectively with little red tape. This way, you'll get wind of customers' problems quickly, and you can take action swiftly.
Acknowledge Your Customer's Concerns
A potential customer can have questions regarding your product or service. When a prospect approaches you expressing concerns over your product or services, empathy demands that you acknowledge it. You don't want to refute or disregard their points even if you believe they're wrong. Instead, listen attentively, pay attention and try to understand their situation.
Also, you should always pay attention to any inaudible responses from your side when listening to the lead‘s plight. When acknowledging a potential customer’s concerns, you may sometimes fail to express your feelings via your body language. In such cases, the prospect may feel like you don't understand or care about them.
You want to avoid this; in other words, you want to conduct yourself in a manner that shows you acknowledge their complaints. Doing so will bring them closer to trusting and patronizing your brand.
Take Your Prospect’s Perspective
Your marketing efforts will drive prospects to contact you. But, your customer service agents will likely be the point of direct contact with your brand. Ensuring this encounter involves empathy can win customers for your business.
It's practically impossible to practice empathy without putting yourself in the other person's position, at least for a while. You won't truly understand what they're experiencing if you can't view things from their perspective. Train your sales reps and marketing department to imagine how they'll react if they trade places with the prospect.
Similarly, encourage your customer service teams to work actively with prospects. Sometimes, prospects can make sales conversations more difficult than they need to be. An excellent way to work with prospective customers is by asking how they want you to resolve their concerns. By borrowing ideas from your customers, you can quickly come up with solutions that'll benefit all parties involved, from the present to the future.
That said, you also want to show empathy towards your staff too. Avoid overworking your employees, and ensure to pay them well. Also, allow them to take time off work; generally treat them how you'll like them to treat you if you trade stations.
Identify and Eliminate All Forms of Biases
We live in a society where there are many unreasonable standards we needlessly demand from others. Such standards are known as biases. Most times, we don't even realize we have biases until someone highlights them.
The last thing you want is for prospective customers to point out biases in your brand. This eventuality reduces the chances of winning them as customers.
Identify any form of bias your brand identity may be displaying and adjust them. Doing this requires conscious effort and a detailed review of your brand identity. It’s the only way to filter out all forms of prejudices completely. In the event a customer points them out to you, don't hesitate to work on the feedback and get rid of the bias. It's an excellent way to show empathy, and it'll help you win customers.
Other Ways in Which Empathy Can Benefit Your Business
Empathy can be advantageous to your business in a variety of ways and lead to the following benefits.
Increased Customer Service and Satisfaction
As covered earlier in this article, empathy enables you to understand your customers better. When you know your customers, you can serve them in a way they'll find satisfactory. In addition, empathy enables you to grasp customers' concerns and provide insights into addressing these problems.
Good empathy practice involves personalization. This practice shows the customers that you care about them and want the best for them. Such an impression significantly influences the customers' perception of your service quality. It ultimately affects customers' satisfaction levels with your service positively.
Empathy Improves Employee and Customer Collaboration
A better, more profound understanding of each other's emotional states enables people to work together better. Empathy gives team heads the emotional intelligence to read nonverbal cues indicating members' responses to certain decisions. They can then discuss these decisions better with the team to determine the most sensible way forward.
Not only that, customers will be more willing to cooperate with you if they know you understand and want to help them. The best way to get difficult clients to work with you is by showing empathy. People tend to reciprocate empathy.
Empathy Improves Employee Productivity
Feelings of respect, care, and importance are some of the biggest motivators for employees. Employees are often more eager to put in efforts where they feel they're important. Genuine empathy on the part of the leader can inspire those feelings in their employees.
When you practice empathy, you'll naturally tend to respect and place a high level of importance on your employees. Showing you understand and appreciate every little contribution each of your employees makes is a form of empathy.
It goes a long way in inspiring your employees to do more and be more for the brand. It'll also encourage your employees to make sacrifices for productivity and growth. Plus, you can always keep track of this brand growth when you combine business practices with software development. Software solutions will help you get an accurate numeric representation of your brand’s development.
Improve Your Competitive Edge With Empathy
What is workflow in marketing if empathy doesn’t define the process? You can elicit better responses from prospective customers just by showing you care about them.
Set out to address their pain points, provide excellent customer service, and see your competitive advantage skyrocket.
Jessica Day - Senior Director, Marketing Strategy, Dialpad
Jessica Day is the Senior Director for Marketing Strategy at Dialpad, a modern business communications platform and one of the top unified communications as a service providers that takes every kind of conversation to the next level—turning conversations into opportunities. Jessica is an expert in collaborating with multifunctional teams to execute and optimize marketing efforts, for both company and client campaigns. Here is her LinkedIn.
